Getting back on the wagon tastes good at first

Boozy February: After Dry January, Tara Gladden gets back on the
wagon and tries to enjoy an alcohol-fuelled trip to Dublin with her
girlfriends. But her month of sobriety has taken its toll...

Sweet beer...

By Tara Gladden

7:00AM GMT 07 Feb 2013

‘Butlins.’

‘Hmm?’ The pub is packed, and we crowd in closer to hear her, cradling our pints to our chests.

‘I said,’ she says, much louder now, ‘I lost my virginity in Butlins.’

For a second the jostling men around us fall still and turn to look at her. A guy with a Rugby shirt tied round his forehead, bandana style, nudges his mate. My friend flushes; takes a long pull on her Guinness.

We crack up and the hurly-burly cranks up again. We whoop, lean in, clink glasses.

One thing’s for sure. This is not a conversation we would be having sober.

After a month on the wagon, I’ve jumped back down into the brawling, bawdy ranks of the drinking classes, where an overshare is only ever a sambucca shot away. I’m in Dublin with a gaggle of girlfriends. To be more specific, I’m in Dublin with a gaggle of funny, raucous girlfriends. This is going to be heavy.

I’m not going to lie. The first pint of the year tastes like youth and freedom and power and God’s own cider apples. Halfway down I can feel the hunch in my shoulders slacken and a fire spark in my belly. Monday’s deadlines get forgotten, Friday’s laughter acquires a dirtier edge. The city stretches out before me, grimy and glittering. This is going to be quite the little adventure.

And I’m right. The friend we’re visiting is a travel PR, and we get the kind of insider’s tour that would have the good folk at Wallpaper City Guides tearing out their directional facial hair in envy. I meet a Dub who managed to get herself excommunicated from the Catholic Church. Dance with some kids who sort of look like a band I sort of like. Try very hard not to stare at Bono.

And I drink: Pints of cider. Glasses of wine. An Irish coffee so sweet and thick and rich that it should have its own reality TV show. And despite everyone’s warnings, I don’t fall over and make an arse of myself, or get drunk and maudlin, or flash my knickers at the Garda.

In fact, mostly I just use booze as an excuse to sit round a table with my friends, spinning stories and laughing so hard it feels like a pilates workout. After a month of blameless sobriety, this is me coming home.

But the story doesn’t quite end there. Because over the course of the weekend there are other, less joyful drinks.

There’s the shot I do to distract myself from the fact that I’m tired, and tired of playing dancefloor defence. There’s the beer I down because we’re moving on, only to find another bottle thrust into my hand. And there’s the late drink that neither me nor my liver can really afford, but which feels churlish to turn down.

A good thing is only a good thing until it isn’t any more.

A month of sobriety has given me time to think about thingsI’d usually skip over: not only the way we use and misuse alcohol, but the difficulties we have in otherwise connecting with ourselves and with each other; the fact that so many first-world, functional adults need a little something to take the edge off.

Maybe it’s time to get au fait with those angles, or else to tool up and sand ‘em down.

In their book, How Much Is Enough? Robert and Edward Skidelsky make the case for the Good Life– one full of leisure, rather than toil; happiness, rather than insatiable striving after money and things and yet another round of Baby Guinnesses. What’s interesting is that they don’t class drinking as an authentic ‘leisure’ activity, even though it often involves many of the things they’re championing: friendship, community, conversation, dancing, competitive rounds of Giant Jenga. Instead they liken it to soma, the government-prescribed intoxicant from Huxley’s Brave New Worldthat keeps citizens in a state of blissful sedation: the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was!

On the Ryan-Air flight home, the soma must be wearing off because theincessant sales pitchesand the whistling stag party fail to strike me as ‘delightfully amusing’. I’d forgotten the way that hangovers compound your weariness, giving you back to yourself a little greyer, a little more frayed round the edges.

This I have not missed.

Yet when the time comes to hug the Butlins Blonde goodbye, she gives me one last grin.

Tara Gladden is a freelance writer, editor, literary consultant and bookseller based in London. She specialises in travel journalism and non-fiction editing, and is currently working on a novel and a sit-com